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Foundation

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

"Hari Seldon, the greatest scholar of the Galactic Empire, creates the science of "PsychoHistory" to predict the future by mathematically modelling the behavior of the galactic society. He forsees the fall of the Galactic empire into "barbarity" for tens of thousands of years. To prevent this, he sets up a "Foundation" at the fringe of the galaxy. Their mission - though the settlers don't realize it at the time - is to be the foundation for a new and more stable Galactic society and government."


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I, Robot

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov


Reviewers are notorious for their overuse of words like "classic", "seminal" and "pioneering" - and I'm as guilty as anyone else in that regard. Nonetheless, all three of these words apply to the late, legendary Isaac Asimov's 1950 collection of short stories, I, Robot.

Published the same year as that other classic, seminal, pioneering collection of short stories - Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles - I, Robot contains a series of tales published throughout the 1940s in various pulp magazines. The book presents them as a series of vignettes related by Dr. Susan Calvin, an elderly "robopsychologist" who is being interviewed in conjunction with her impending retirement from the mega-corporation US Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc. Her half-century career with the company that was founded the same year she was born (1982) has seen robots grow from relatively crude, mute household appliances to lifelike androids scarcely discernable from human beings.


Originally published in 1950
Reprinted in the US by Bantam Spectra
Mass Market Paperback, 272 pages
December 1991
Reprinted in the UK by Voyager
Mass Market Paperback, 256 pages
December 2001

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